How Can Organizations Progress Towards Gender Equality

In the future, there will be no female leaders. There will just be leaders ― Sheryl Sandberg

Gender Equality at workplace is becoming one of the hottest topics of discussion at all organizations’ boardrooms.

Despite the efforts taken by a significant marginal number of organizations in improving gender equality, female workers claim that they are still facing hurdles in recruitment process, gender pay gap and career progression prospects. While this occupational segregation, inadequate growth prospects and unequal wages is illegal, a research made by McKinsey and Company shows that Gender-diverse organizations are 15% more likely to outperform their peers.

So, how organizations can bridge the gap and extend a helping hand to women to up the game by one?

1. Blind Hiring

Organizations can nip the bud of gender discrimination right at the recruitment process by Blind Hiring, a practice in which elementary biasing of candidates like name, age, gender, geography are eliminated. Top organizations including Deloitte, HSBS, the BBC are already in en route to Blind Hiring. Adopting AI/ machine learning based platform for recruitment screening can close the gender gap as long as the system is not susceptible to human bias.

Your job description can shoo away potential candidates before even applying for a job. Yes, the choice of words in your JD have huge impact on the applicants’ gender. Adopting a gender neutral JD drafting tool like Textio can potentially attract more candidates under your umbrella. Adopting AI/machine learning enabled ATS ignores gender discriminatory attributes of an applicant’s resume.

Screening candidates only based on the skills required for the job

Objective hiring, wherein candidates are assessed only based on the technical competencies/ domain competencies by means of an Objective Talent Assessment Platform like Xobin. The assessment reports map the competencies of the test taker with that of the competencies required for the job and thereby promoting a data-backed hiring decisions rather than a unconscious prejudice of a hiring manager.

2. Harnessing Innate Behavioral Skills Of Women

Have you ever wondered why design, HR, customer service departments are buzzing with women employees?

This might sound ridiculous to some men, but yes, women are natural caregivers and have the innate behavioral traits and emotional intelligence to connect with people’s emotions.

Harnessing psychometric and behavioral assessments can depict the culture fit and behavioral fit of employees. Organizations can foster gender equality by assigning roles to women are in line with innate behavioral traits. Key behavioral traits of women like empathy, persuasive influence, organizing skills help them to outperform men in few niche job roles.

According to Businessinsider.in, here are the top most favored jobs for women employees:

3. Formulating Better Retention Policies

The labour force participation rate for women of working age declined from 42% in 1993-94 to 31% in 2011-12. Predictable social norms are attributed to women quitting work in India: marriage, motherhood, vexed gender relations and biases, and patriarchy. Retention of women in mid-career levels is needs to be at parity with that of men.

Here are 3 steps if taken at the right time, can retain women in the workforce and maintain gender equality.

1. Enabling Flexibility In The Workforce

Post marriage or motherhood, most women are entangled with a lot more personal commitments and work might take a backseat in this regard. Organizations shall, in such cases could offer flexible work options. According to a study from Boston College, 90% of people believe that that having access to flexible work options contributes to their overall quality of life to a “moderate” or “great extent.”

Organizations should not understate the importance of creating and promoting employee network groups. This creates a community for employees who are going through similar experiences (both work and personal) to share best practices, hardships and advice.

Strict Harassment Policies formulated need to be communicated to women and young women who enter the workforce need to be trained to raise their voices and report to senior management.

The Harvard Business Review says 17% of women leave the “fast lane” of their career because work is not enjoyable or satisfying. To avoid losing this talent, organizations should give women the opportunity (and support) to switch their focus areas and, as I like to say, “feed their soul.”

4. Providing Returnship Opportunities For Women On Career Break

Providing returnship opportunities and policies for women on a career break (owing to personal commitments) is always a win situation to the company. It takes relatively a lesser investment for organizations to hire and train a woman who is already exposed to the corporate culture.

Women on their return to the workforce after a career break would in turn bring time management skills, higher productivity, different perspectives and more inclusion to workplace.

Organizations such as Tata Steel, RBS, Genpact and Amazon have programmes to provide a second-career opportunity to women and ensure that their return to work is smooth.

The right programme could attract this talented pool of women back into the workplace, helping to build more gender diversity and female role models. – Tania Chatterjee, director of HR & diversity lead at RBS

The Tata Group has been running a programme called Tata Second Careers Inspiring Possibilities (SCIP) for returning women.

The SCIP policy includes flexible work hours and work from home to help maintain work-life balance post their return to work after a career break. – Tata Motors chief HR officer, Gajendra Chandel

5. Internalizing Gender Audit to Foster Gender Equality

Often organizations are found merely doing lip service by announcing policies for gender equality. To ensure that the policies are implemented on the ground, yearly a gender audit is a must.

So, what really is a Gender Audit ? It is a yearly audit of employee payroll policies, performance, time off, role of job, career trajectory. The insights from such audits often provide hard facts about the gap between policies and their effect.

According to the White House, a full-time working women earn just 78 cents for every dollar a man earns, on average. And many women feel that they are not paid on par with men doing the same work. Many companies do not feel comfortable to break open the wall of gender pay gap.

Case in point is Salesforce, a leading Customer Relationship Management Software. The company in 2018, decided to make it’s gender audit public. Mark Benioff, CEO showed an ideal example of how organizations can immensely thrive on gender diversity. Mark wholeheartedly accepted the findings that a gender wage gap in comparable roles existed at his company, and he put a plan-with $3 million in funding-in place to resolve it.

This initiative have won the all the hearts of the company’s women employees.